“A gate,” I observed.
“I’m hoping so,” he said. “Alexis?”
“We need to sacrifice something of value, destroy it irrevocably, and say a few words.”
“Define ‘value’,” Peter said.
“If you have to ask, it’s probably not valuable enough,” Alexis said.
“I’m starting to hate this whole thing,” Peter said. “Karma, which apparently means you can’t lie, but when you want details, you can’t get a damn straight answer either.”
“You’ve basically summed up the last few weeks of my life,” I said.
“That’s reality,” Ellie said. “Everyone tells you to do this, do that, there are rules and they fuck you in the ass if you obey them, and if you don’t obey them, then they fuck you in the ass.”
“There’s a lot of ass-fucking going on in your worldview, huh?” Peter asked.
“Fuck you,” she said.
“I think,” Tiff said, “that just like real life, you can be kind, honest, and decent, and it’s something that helps you, even if it’s in subtle ways.”
“Says Tiffany,” Ellie said, “Happy go lucky, smile and it’ll all be alright!”
“Shut up,” Alexis said, looking up from her book. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know that I got dealt a bad hand. Shitty family, get diagnosed with a learning disorder finally, and it all makes sense. But it’s when I’ve already decided to drop out. But oh, hey, mom and dad didn’t notice I had problems because they were too busy divorcing. I drop out, dad mostly disowns me, mom helps me get by only if I do favors for her. I figured it all out pretty damn quickly, how everything works. If I want something, I have to deal with others to get it, and everyone I deal with wants to take advantage. The only way I’ve figured I can make it is if I lose well, or if I don’t play their fucking game. Be a good little loser. But oh, hey, if I’d actually just smiled and been a good girl, it’d all have worked out fine.”
The sarcasm was thick with that last line.
“I’m not getting into this,” Tiff said, hunched over her diagram. Alexis came to her side, book in one hand, a wooden box in the other. Tiff took the wooden box and set it on a shelf, as part of the diagram.
That Tiff was hearing Ellie at all was kind of amazing, considering the variety of claws and other limbs that were starting to reach through the holes that had been opened in the door.
“You’re not getting into it because you admit what you said is stupid?”
“Ellie,” Alexis snapped, “Shut up.”
“I can speak for myself, Alexis. Ellie, I’m not interested in discussing it,” Tiff said, her voice tense, “because I think you’re wrong. You guys don’t have a monopoly on shitty families, and you don’t have a monopoly on shitty circumstances. My family’s personalities were worse, I’m pretty sure my upbringing sucked more than yours, and I still believe what I believe. Keep your chin up and persevere and there is a way through all this.”
“Your family was worse? How?”
“Their personalities were. If you go outside just personalities, you get the whole ‘dark magic’ thing going on in the background, and yeah, your family wins. But for personality, a lack of basic human decency, my family trumps yours. They weren’t fancy or complex or even varied in their horribleness, but they were bad, and bad enough that I’m not interested in discussing it or elaborating.”
Ellie opened her mouth to answer that, but the death glares from a few others and an increase in the intensity of the pounding on the doors kept her from actually speaking.
“Valuable thing,” Alexis said.
Ellie reached into her vest pocket and pulled out a trinket. There was a woman’s face cut in ivory, against a tarnished silver background. It swung on a silver chain.
“I thought I stopped you from looting the house,” I said. “I didn’t see you pocket that one.”
“That was you?”
Alexis took the brooch. “Works.”
The brooch was placed in the center of the gate.
The scratching and pounding had stopped.
There was only silence outside. No growling, no footsteps or splashes, no laborious destruction of the wall.
It was not a good silence.
“Hurry,” Christoff said.
“Having the thing isn’t enough, we need to destroy the valuable object,” Alexis said. She still held the book.
“I don’t have a sledgehammer, sorry,” Evan commented.
As if the word sledgehammer had invoked something, a heavy mass slammed into the bookshelf doors. Several of us stumbled. Books all across the library fell from their shelves, and even the floorboards shifted position so they didn’t all lay flat, before they resettled into their old positions. Approximately.
The damage to the doors had spread, every hole almost twice as big, every crack three times as long or twice as wide.
The doors wouldn’t take many more hits on that level.
“Holy shit,” Peter said.
“What was that?”
“Fuck,” Alexis said, eyes back on the diagram, “We need to annihilate this pendant now, and get out of here. Think.”
More silence from outside.
“Biggest, heaviest thing in the room?” Peter asked. “Desk?”
Our eyes collectively fell on the old writing desk. Old fashioned, it probably had as much overall mass as a grand piano. I’d tried to move it alone, when Rose had trapped me in the mirror, and I’d failed.
“All together,” Alexis said.
Everyone, Eva and me excepted, gathered around the writing desk. A collective effort to lift it-
Another slam on the door.
The cracks and holes opened further. The mirror I was dwelling in rocked side by side violently enough that I thought it might fall over. Peter caught it.
Metal yawned, and dust fell from the ceiling in plumes, every joint and joist, nail and screw in the room straining and popping as reality found itself at odds with the configuration of things.
I could see a figure on the far side of the doors. Deep brown skin, eyes like liquid gold, hips wrapped in wispy white cloth that was gossamer-fine. Genderless.
“Djinn,” Alexis said, breathless. “Lift.”
The Djinn turned his back, walking away. It was going to come back, most likely, and it was going to act.
Fuck.
Big and bad enough that the brainless little homunculi were afraid to approach while it was taking point. The scariest Others that rational individuals steered clear of were steering clear of this thing.
The group waddled over toward the diagram, table held between them.
“Careful,” Alexis said, voice strained with the burden. “If we mess up the lines, we won’t get another chance.”
I knelt, my face almost pressed against the mirror. “Left. Alexis, Ty, swing your half left a half step…”
They moved.
If all four legs came down…
I saw Roxanne step away, more in the way than helping. “Roxanne, move the tome to your right, put it under the back leg, furthest from the pendant.”
“Why-”
“Do it!” Kathy hissed.